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June 29, 2008
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: Genesis 22:1-14, Romans 6:19a, 20-23, Matthew
10:40-42
Welcoming Jesus, Offering Selves: No Human Being
Alone
Julie and I represent United Methodist of Northern Nevada on the board of
RAIN – Religious Alliance in Nevada – advocates for social justice in and around
the Nevada State Legislature. Others represented by RAIN are
Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians and Roman Catholics throughout the
state. So we faced the question of what kind of witness to bear at the
special session Friday – when budget cuts of nearly $300 million were laid upon
previous cuts of some $900 million – a total equal in cost, I think, to a few
days of the war in Iraq.
I felt like were witnessing one long slow painful death blow to those least
prepared to take care of and for themselves – the very young and very old, the
very sick and very poor, the immigrant and imprisoned -- and all those who sleep
on the ground. So I simply stood out in front of the building in a clergy
shirt with two signs Julie made for me – “What Would Jesus Cut” and “Cuts
Bleed.” Cuts slowly drain the life and hope out of real people and parts
of our common body.
Just as we struggle to keep the morality -- which is the way we treat others --
in our own congregational and connectional conference budgets, so our state, our
city and county, not to mention our nation, in Jesus’ words, display by where our
treasure is where our hearts are also. One of the hurt places of Janis’ Siemon
heart, by the way, when she had to spend herself living with cancer, was she had
just become part of the county advisory board for Health and Human Services –
taking on for us all the very struggle to see that the neediest might survive.
Maybe more of us are called to follow Janis in helping our system get better.
Let me unpack this title a little -- “Welcoming Jesus,” as Jesus invites us to do
in every last person we meet or even imagine – in whatever the need – for food,
for drink, for clothing, for housing, for medical care, for prison visitation. “Offering
Selves,” as we cannot help but do if we are attuned to the person lying beaten and
bleeding by the side of our road as a neighbor related to us, and we to them; or
if we acknowledge Jesus makes friends even of tax collectors (!), and instructs
us to give to Caesar the means to exercise God-given responsibility of the state
– even as our “not for profit” status requires we confront Caesar so to do it unto
“the least of these.” “No Human Being Alone,” as we only fully exist, fully
know ourselves, grow ourselves in the image of our Creator, in communion with all.
Author/theologian Frederick Buechner addresses the limits of thinking each of us
can make it on our own and take total care of ourselves – “The trouble with steeling
yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures
your life against being destroyed secures your life against being opened up and
transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from.” Do we hear that?
It may take more creative courage to be weak and open than to be strong and sealed
off – to be vulnerable and exposed than to be invulnerable and isolated. Buechner
continues – “You can survive on your own. You can grow stronger on your
own. You can even prevail on your own. But you cannot become human
on your own!” None of us – no matter how strong and secure, how
self-started and self-reliant we appear to be – none of us can become, or
remain, human on our own. We are all in life all together or not at all.
Jesus leads us to live interdependently, inter-relatedly – no matter how “independent”
we are or call ourselves being. Jesus is trying to say to us, if I am the
Christ (and we say he is, whether or not we believe it, whether or not we act like
he brings messianic justice and joy to us!) -- If I am the Christ, then I am in
everyone! I am at the mercy of everything human! I laugh, I cry, I hurt,
I heal, I live, I die. I trust your good will, your hospitality, your welcome
of every person! Life of faith in me is life for all at the “welcome table”
with all of creation. This passage of Matthew today is the high point of Jesus
teaching of discipleship -- all about welcoming and being welcomed! All about
living by hospitality – radical openness and inclusiveness toward all, availability
and accessibility toward all, compassion and solidarity toward all – acts of concrete
kindness toward all.
How close father Abraham comes this morning to blowing the whole thing from the
beginning! Fortunately, this God who comes to such fruition in Jesus follows
a long learning curve through sacred history. God here “provides” for Abraham
– a word in Hebrew meaning a way of “pro-visioning,” a way of fore-seeing what gives
life, not death, in the end. For Abraham’s was a culture not unlike our own
– sacrificing children on altars of war and greed, violence and consumption.
Kids today need no less a “pro-visioning” for them, a way of believing that life
is FOR them not against them – that they have a future to live into, to embrace
– not a future to die out of, to escape. On this one shrinking and suffering
Earth, there are not more “my” children and “your” children, “their” children and
“our” children – ours to be kept safe and secure, theirs to be sickened and starved.
There is only ONE “children” now, and “they” are all of “us!” How dare we
sacrifice ANY?
I hope we will read through these poems of Madeleine L’Engle in our Words for
Meditation. She’s pretty clear that such sacrifice is a male thing.
Sarah figures prominently in the stories of God’s birth-announcement to them
–She does what? She laughs!! And last week she pulls rank on Hagar
to protect Isaac’s interests. But here is Isaac about to be sacrificed,
and his mother is not even mentioned! The poet says Sarah feels toyed with
like a mouse. Nobody asks her anything.
She names God’s learning curve: “You – father-God – have yet to learn what it is
to be a mother!” That may well be the history of God ever since – becoming
more like a mother, even a Mother Earth – with room and protection for all of her
children! God and we have so much to learn yet together. Thank God for
a God who chooses to be so incarnate, so embodied in us, as to learn with us!
Does that not give us slight hope for the world? That for all of the terror
we do in God’s name, we may yet learn with God to “provide,” to pro-vision alternatives
to it?
So mother Sarah does not even enter the story. How could she? How
could any mother agree to the willful self-sacrifice of her child? On any
altar, no matter how holy or how patriotic? Abraham tries to assure Isaac
that God will provide, pro-vision the lamb for burnt offering. Yet and
still Abraham puts his son through what can only be called terror – building an
altar, laying the wood for burning, binding his son hand and foot, laying him on
the wood, reaching for the knife to kill him. Only then, but at least
then, does God intervene. Is there something here about what we come to
call “well-being” and “best interests” of the child?
Kierkegaard calls the high-stakes game between God and Abraham “teleological suspension
of the ethical” – as if to say there may be an end, a result, so holy, so patriotic,
so compelling – such as Abraham’s unquestioning trust and obedience before God –
requiring even the sacrifice of our children and the full promise to us represented
by them. Thank God we live in a time to question and challenge the blind turning
over of children to God, to church, to state, to repression, to war – sometimes
even to parents! Jesus would have us listen to the child in us! To the
Christ in each one of us! We are Abraham in his loyal blindness, we are Isaac
in his stark terror, we are Sarah in her imagined outrage. In each one of
us lives a scary parent, a scared child, and often a helpless and left-out bystander.
The lately outspoken prophet George Carlin would remind us of the terror and trauma
we may have done to our own nation’s body and soul! One of his tragic-comic
riffs goes like this – “We were founded on a very basic double standard. This
country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free. Am I right?
A group of slave owners who wanted to be free, so they killed a lot of white English
people in order to continue owning their black African people, so they could wipe
out the rest of the red Indian people and move west and steal the rest of the land
from the brown Mexican people, giving them a place to take off and drop their nuclear
weapons on the yellow Japanese people. You know what the motto of this country
ought to be? You give us a color, we’ll wipe it out!”
God in Abraham simply reveals, it does not have to be that way! God does not
have to be loved out if fear! In fact, how can God be? What kind of
God is that? The people of Nevada are, per capita, the fourteenth wealthiest
among states. Yet the funding of our human services ranks at the very bottom
of states. It does not have to be that way! We as a nation and state
and community are capable of so much more generosity and appreciation of others
– so much more empathy and concern with their hunger and need. If any of us
lives a life unfree, less than human, sick with needless suffering – then all of
us are separated by sin and by death. The alternative, says Paul, is “a whole,
healed, put together life” with all!
If we find the orders of those in authority of any kind – those whom we learn so
blindly to obey – in conflict with the full promise of God for us – a promise of
goodness and love, of justice and peace – then mere obedience is not enough!
Obedience, Abraham learns, is not an end in itself. It is a means of
embracing, embodying, enjoying the full promise of God – for others as for us.
I often think of Jeremiah 31 – God will write God’s own laws of life and love directly
upon our hearts! Each one of us may come to know and to name, to respond and
to follow God for ourselves. Each of us may become expert on who we are and
how we are called –especially to be in just and joyful relationship with all the
world. All means all! – All of each one of us is in all of this all together
with all of the others of all of us in all of this world! May I say that part
again? And the church dared to say anyway – Amen!
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